John W. Campbell, Jr.

writer
Short Story

Twilight

In 1932, James Waters Bendell picks up a magnificently sculpted hitchhiker named Ares Sen Kenlin (the Sen means he’s a scientist, but Waters is just a name) who says that he’s trying to get back to his home time (3059) after beding pulled into a far distant future where mankind has atrophied because of their reliance on machines. —Jeff Delgado
They stand about, little misshapen men with huge heads. But their heads contain only brains. They had machines that could think—but somebody turned them off a long time ago, and no one knew how to start them again. That was the trouble with them. They had wonderful brains. Far better than yours or mine. But it must have been millions of years ago when they were turned off, too, and they just hadn’t thought since then. Kindly little people.
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  • Science Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel
Short Story

Night

Bob Carter takes a plane up to 45,000 feet to test an anti-gravity device, but instead it hurls him into the same future as the story “Twilight”—but whereas the earlier story had mankind who were dying out in 7,000,000 A.D. because of the ubiquity of machines, Carter finds himself billions of years beyond that, with both man and (most) machines long gone.
Ah, yes, you have a mathematical means of expression, but no understanding of that time, so it is useless. But the last of humanity was allowed to end before the Sun changed from the original G-O stage—a very, very long time ago.
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  • Science Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel
Short Story

Elimination

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  • Science Fiction
  • Undetermined Time Travel
Short Story

Forgetfulness

Millions of years after mankind raised various species and sent them to the stars, one of the species returns and believes that humans have fallen into a primitive existence. And the time travel? Partway through the story, there’s a power source that goes to the end of time and cycles back to the beginning of time. In addition, Fred Galvin pointed out to me that even though it takes the aliens six years to travel to Earth, when they return to their home planet, only one year has passed, apparently a complete undoing by Seun of Rhth of the alien invasion.

The story also appeared in Healy and McComas’s seminal anthology, Adventures in Time and Space, and it was made into a one-act play in 1943 by Wayne Gordon.
In the first revolution it made, the first day it was built, it circled to the ultimate end of time and the universe, and back to the day it was built.
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  • Science Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel
Audio Play

Exploring Tomorrow

From Dec 1957 to Jun 1958, John W. Campbell himself hosted this radio series for the Mutual Broadcasting System. Many episodes were written by John Flemming, and although there was no official connection between the show and Campbell’s Astounding, many other scripts were by Campbell’s stable of writers including Poul Anderson, Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick, Gordon R. Dickson, Murry Leinster, Robert Silverberg and George O. Smith (“Time Traveler”). There were at least three time-travel episodes.
You’ve got a son to take care of you in your old age, Mr. Thompson.
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  • Eloi Bronze Medal
  • Science Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel